


You Scare Me, Beautiful

by KDblack



Series: In the Shadow of Midgar [3]
Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII (Video Game 1997)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, M/M, Reno doesn't know how these facts can coexist, SOLDIERs are terrifying, Zack is a sweet puppydog, but he doesn't like it, not really romance but wasn't sure how else to tag it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-27
Updated: 2020-05-27
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:47:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24412318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KDblack/pseuds/KDblack
Summary: Turk joke: how many bullets do you need to take down a SOLDIER First Class?Answer: as many as it takes.It's funnier if you know the kind of monster SOLDIERs become.
Relationships: Zack Fair & Reno, Zack Fair/Reno
Series: In the Shadow of Midgar [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1765723
Comments: 12
Kudos: 57





	You Scare Me, Beautiful

Turk joke: how many bullets do you need to take down a SOLDIER First Class?

Answer: as many as it takes.

It's funnier if you know the kind of monster SOLDIERs become.

* * *

Zack joins up at fourteen years old. Reno's already been a Turk for years by then, but he's always been able to pass for younger, and he likes to disguise himself as a trainee during downtime. Spend a couple weeks messing around with the kids, spinning tall tales and keeping an eye out for anyone who sees through the act. Zack doesn't, but he does get Reno to like him, and frankly that's a hell of a lot more impressive. Reno doesn't like SOLDIER wannabes. He likes SOLDIERs even less. But he does like passion and enthusiasm, and if Zack were any more bright-eyed and bushy-tailed he'd be a literal puppy. Add in the purposeful optimism, mischief streak, and sheer vicious tenacity, and Reno's hooked.

He fingers Zack as a possible Turk recruit, but Veld doesn't go for it. Too bad. Drill some self-preservation into that thick skull and he'd have made a good one.

It's a miracle their friendship survives Zack's first round of mako treatments. New SOLDIERs are ticking bombs, pumped full of chemicals and breaking everything they touch. Reno's all set to cut and run. But Zack just locks himself in the barracks for eighteen hours, then stumbles outside, flops down on the nearest couch in the common room, and puts on some awful reality show with the volume down too low. It's garbage. After an hour, Reno slips out of the vents he's been watching from.

“You still alive?”

Zack groans so low it makes Reno's bones vibrate. “No.”

“You gonna kill me if I sit on you?”

“Fuck no.” He makes weak grabby hands in Reno's direction. “Pressure good.”

So they spend the rest of the day like that, Reno perched on Zack's back and straining to make out the bullshit being fed into confession cams while Zack attempts to suffocate himself in couch cushions. Twenty-four hours ago, Zack would've been complaining about the weight and trying to buck Reno off. Now he melts underneath Reno's bony ass like he's wearing a weighted blanket. When Reno casually sticks a hand under Zack's top, muscle swells and pulses beneath his fingers. Creepiest fucking thing you can imagine. He leaves his hand there – exposure therapy and stuff – and does not jump when he feels things moving under raw, tight skin.

SOLDIERs smell like mako and chemicals, antiseptic worked so deep into their skin it never comes out. 50% suffer from mild symptoms of mako poisoning and need regular booster shots just to keep their bodies functioning. 30% get harmless but embarrassing mutations like 'lose all body hair, androgenic and vellus alike' or 'have your pupils permanently adjusted for night vision'. The really unlucky ones have structural mutations set in: plantigrade legs snapping into digitigrade proportions, tongues outgrowing mouths, eyes sprouting up where they don't belong. Those poor bastards never leave the labs. Can't have word getting out, after all. But even the lucky ones don't smell human anymore. 

Zack used to smell like sunlight and Gongaga dirt. After that day, he smells like the rest of them: another dead thing found floating in a reactor. He also loses all his body hair, including the stubble he was trying to grow but not including his eyebrows or increasingly terrible haircut, and Reno mocks him mercilessly about it.

So yeah, Zack's a good one. Take a special kind of teenager to suffer the aches of mako dosing, the sensory overload that comes with it, and the grab-bag of weird monster instincts Hojo added to the baths this month, and not start throwing his weight around. Reno knows himself well enough to admit that he wouldn't meet his own qualifications. The second he was able, he'd be chucking cars off the plate to watch the fireworks. Zack barely even sweeps people up off their feet by accident. Biceps bigger than Reno's thighs, eyes almost Sephiroth-bright, and somehow he still reads as the same over-enthusiastic puppy he was when he arrived. It's uncanny.

Reno's not exactly sure when Zack pegged him as a Turk rather than a wannabe, but there's not even a flicker of surprise on the boy's face when they first get assigned a mission together. For a second, he lets himself fantasize about a world where Veld listened to him and Zack still smells like sunlight, still has eyes warmer than they are bright, still moves like a human instead of a ghost. Then Zack smiles with his teeth and the moment is gone.

All SOLDIERs grow fangs, eventually. Most file them down for appearances. Zack's stay little, almost cute, just enough to add a hint of wildness to his image. He gets to keep them and Reno gets to wonder what they'd feel like nipping at his fingers. Or his shoulder. Or the nape of his neck, all nerves, spinal column so close to the surface.

* * *

Research Question: can SOLDIER Third Class – whoops, Second Class now – Zack Fair bite out a throat? 

Hypothesis: yes, but he'd need to be very motivated.

Observation: Zack is nothing if not motivated.

Conclusion: Reno needs to stop thinking about this. It doesn't help.

Nothing does.

* * *

Here's the thing: most SOLDIERs are duds, full of misfiring nerves and dead-end mutations, whatever enhancements they picked up in the mako baths balanced out with nasty side effects. Yeah, they can punch through walls, but Reno can take 'em, easy. The Elites are different, but the Elites are company lifers. Sephiroth's been at Shinra longer than Reno's been alive. Hell, according to the paperwork, he's literally company property. Has to file out a ton of forms whenever he wants to cut his hair, which explains that Rapunzel look he's going for.

Then there's Zack. Zack's not a dud. Zack may well be the opposite of a dud, and Reno can't see that turning out well for anyone. Not that his opinion matters. This is between Zack and the Science Department, with presidential veto if the big man upstairs decides Hojo's ruining Zack's marketability. SOLDIER is a propaganda unit above all else. The ability to leap thirty feet straight up and rip steel girders in half with bare hands is nothing compared to having cameras film you doing it. Zack can do all of that and look like he's having the time of his life, which makes him valuable. Until the chemicals in his blood get out of control and his perfect body falls apart. Until his idealism breaks under the weight of the world and he can't live with what he's become. Until he slips up in the field and his stellar results in the lab are all he has going for him. 

It's Shinra. No such thing as irreplaceable.

In the countryside, little kids run away from home just for the chance to see a SOLDIER. Reno pities them. 

Every time they meet, Zack's a little paler, his movements a little more like water and a little less like muscle.

“Your hair's getting long,” Reno comments after Modeoheim. He tugs at a lock for emphasis. It feels more like Bandersnatch spines than human hair.

Zack shrugs and leans into the touch like a cat. “It's getting hard to cut.”

“Gonna trip over it one of these days.” That's an exaggeration and they both know it. Zack's First Class now, not bound by the limits of mere mortals. He can wear his hair however he wants. 

“Fine,” Zack grumbles. The next time Reno sees him, his once-bronze skin is waxy, but his increasingly shaggy mane has been cropped above his shoulders. If Reno looks close, he can see the places where Zack stopped using scissors and grabbed something sharper.

What would Angeal think? 

Who knows. Who cares.

* * *

“Tseng thinks we're fucking.”

Zack blinks up at Reno, eyes wide. “Dude, you can fit in those vents?”

“Don't even think about it,” Reno warns. He rattles the grate pointedly. Nice and strong, durable enough to make a First Class think twice. Screws are loose enough to take a screwdriver to, though. Someone should fix that. “It's a squeeze for me. You wouldn't even get your head in.”

“Aw.” Zack's entire body droops. It's great. “Anyway, what's the big deal? Tseng thinks everyone's fucking. It's his hobby.”

True. Every Turk needs an outlet – something totally meaningless and only tangentially related to their actual job, which they can obsess over in relative safety. Tseng has office romances. Rude has soaps. Cissnei has pin-ups and romance novels. Reno has his dedication to slowly driving people nuts. SOLDIERs have their own little tics, but they tend to be less coping mechanism and more symptom. Ask Genesis. Shit, ask Angeal.

“Usually he hooks me up with nobodies, though,” Reno says. “A lot of them. Last time I checked, I was screwing half the secretary pool.”

Mako blue eyes crinkle with laughter. “Only half?”

“I know, I was offended, too.” 

Zack laughs again and and puts his arms behind his head, bears all his little fangs in a dog's guileless grin. “Are you offended now?”

“Fuck no,” Reno chirps. “You're a catch.”

It's true. It's also true that Reno is never going to catch Zack's huge shoulder in real life, never going to tug him down to kissing height, never going to find out if he tastes like mako all the way through. Every year, they lose cadets to SOLDIER strength – crippled, killed, permanently traumatized. Most of the time, it's accidental. Under the Plate, they tell horror stories about what happens when it's not an accident.

Turk grapevine says Zack's got a girlfriend now. Reno very carefully doesn't think about who she is or what orders he might get concerning her. Instead, he hopes the two of them are taking it slow. The whole rotten city is living on borrowed time, but when SOLDIERs and Turks get involved, it tends to run out quicker.

* * *

Zack's eighteen years old when he vanishes. Too bad. Reno was hoping to wring at least a decade of cheerful eyecandy and troublemaker camaraderie out of him before saying goodbye. He was the last good thing in SOLDIER. Now there's nothing but dregs left. Reno smiles and jokes from down hallways, on top of tables, over intercom systems, and dodges when the new Thirds try and touch him. 

Nobody outside the department comments on his sudden change in demeanour. SOLDIER is falling apart and everybody knows it. The pillars which held it up are gone – traitors, or dead, or worse. All that's left is a pit of monsters crudely disguised as human. Snapping at each other, scratching endlessly at their own skin, and always reeking of reactor run-off.

In his more melancholy moments, Reno wonders if Zack would've ended up like this: cracked, broken, falling prey to whatever monster Hojo put in his head. Probably. They all do, in the end. Reno's just glad he didn't have to watch it happen.

He still has Zack's number memorized. They were gonna disconnect the answering machine after six months, but Reno threw his weight around. Blah blah MIA don't mean dead blah blah. It was bullshit then and it's bullshit now, but it feels good to have something left.

Sometimes, when he's particularly drunk, he calls it just to hear Zack purr into his ear again.

* * *

Turk joke: how many bullets do you need to kill a friend?

Answer: as many as it takes.

SOLDIERs have an alternate version: 'none, Turks don't have friends.' And you know what? That's fair.

Zack never told that variation. If he had, he might've lived longer.

**Author's Note:**

> _Who in their right mind  
>  Did you think you'd find  
> Standing behind you  
> Your guardian angel?_
> 
> _Don't be ridiculous  
>  Man up this is it  
> We can build a fire  
> I am not a liar_  
> -Autoheart, We Can Build a Fire


End file.
